How, then, to reconcile the surface and the depth? How to reconcile England and America, the love of men and the love of women, childhood and adulthood, joy and sorrow, the glamorous and the substantive ways of life? It seemed too often to me that the surface of my life was a work in lacquer, exquisitely wrought to conceal the simple but cavernous fact of a wooden box beneath; or on better days it seemed that a watery surface was so churned with waves and turbulence as to give only a passing hint of the infinite stillness below. This is what I imagined: a surface that gave way only by degrees, a surface as transparent as what lay under it, a surface that was like a glassy and exquisite introduction to depth itself. This is what I imagined: that you could slide from level to level, from surface to depth, by slow and gradual measures, never losing sight of your passage, so that from the greatest depth you might gaze up infinitely far and still catch the hues of the sky, so that from the surface you would see at least the vague and hulking forms of the rocks on the ocean floor. This is what I imagined: a life that was both beautiful and full of meaning, a life that encompassed what I had felt for men and what I had felt for women, a life as innocent as birth and as wise as age, a life made glorious not by the joy that comes of pain avoided, but by the joy that lives intimately with the unavoidable kinds of pain. I dreamed of a life in which the control at which I had arrived in England met with the power of my feelings in America, a world in which what was heavy encompassed some measure of lightness, and what was light, all the weight of insight. It was not compromise that I imagined; it was not a limpid pool or a fresh pond that I wanted, but the sea itself, for a flashing instant as clear as knowledge.

VIII: An Almost Perfect Party

VIII

AN ALMOST PERFECT PARTY